The students should
know some basic sun and earth relationships to successfully complete this unit.
These include earth’s motions of rotation on its axis and revolution about the
sun. The student should have an understanding of the tilt of the earth’s axis
of rotation.
A
very simple tutorial titled “Here
Comes the Sun” is available from the Plymouth State College Meteorology
Program. The most relevant links on this page are titled Why are there
seasons?, Rotation, Equinoxes, Solstices, and Our Orbit.
These are animated.
A more advanced tutorial on this topic can be found at:
Tutorial on
Earth-Sun Relations and Seasons
(http://daphne.palomar.edu/jthorngren/tutorial.htm)
Earth's
Axial Tilt and the Seasons
(http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980211f.html)
A NASA high-energy astronomer gives a short answer to the question “How does the earth's tilt affect the
changing of the seasons, and what different angles cause those different seasons?”